The Base: Pine Gap's role in US Warfighting

National Security Agency documents exclusively obtained by Background Briefing reveal the extent to which Australia is assisting the United States military to fight its wars.

These documents, together with the stories of people intimately involved in those wars, uncover the crucial role the US-Australian satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia has in battlefield operations around the world. Peter Cronau reports.

Transcript

Peter Cronau: Australia has stepped into a brave new era of global warfighting. Support for US military operations is taking Australia and our personnel into a murky legal area of extrajudicial killings and military campaigns that have not been sanctioned by the United Nations. And all this is happening with little parliamentary oversight or public debate.

Richard Tanter: The documents show us that Pine Gap is definitely involved in American military operations in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, in fact around the world where necessary. So these documents are confirmation of what we understood Pine Gap to be capable of, and we now know for sure that this is what Pine Gap does.

Cian Westmoreland: We talk about military partnerships but in reality the Australian military is really doing the bidding of the US military, in a sense. We talk about how we are partnered in Alice Springs but it seems more geared towards US interests.

Lisa Ling: Is silence complicity? I mean I believe it is. If I'm not speaking out about something that I don't want done in my name, then I'm complicit.

No longer do borders define the battlefield. Increasingly Australia is being asked to provide personnel and military support to wars in far-flung places in which the national interest of Australia is not always clear.

John McCarthy: There is hardly anything more important to a country than the issue of overseas military involvement. And I find it extraordinary that questions of deployment of troops out of Australia are not debated in the Australian Parliament. Most countries would find that just bizarre.

Peter Cronau: That's John McCarthy, one of Australia's most distinguished and experienced diplomats. More from him later.

But it seems it's not our troops that are Australia's most important contribution to international warfighting, nor our planes or submarines, it's the massive satellite surveillance base in Central Australia, just 15 minutes' drive south of Alice Springs, at Pine Gap. It sits between two folds in the West MacDonnell Ranges, and has 800 Australian and US staff, and some 38 radar dishes pointing skywards. Officially it's labelled the 'Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap'.

Do I call it the base or the facility or what?

David Rosenberg: You can call it the base, the base. People call it the base, or you can just call it Pine Gap. People simply refer to it as the base. Instead of saying the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, or the Joint Space Research Facility Pine Gap, they would simply refer to 'the base'.

Peter Cronau: He should know. That's David Rosenberg, a career-long intelligence analyst for the USA's National Security Agency, the NSA, he worked inside Pine Gap for 18 years before retiring in 2008.

But not only is use of the word 'base' sensitive, so too is just what it does.

This is the official mission statement of the base, released jointly by the US and Australian governments.

Reading: The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is a joint US/Australian defence facility whose function is to support the national security of both the US and Australia. The [facility] contributes to verifying arms control and disarmament agreements and monitoring military developments.

Peter Cronau: But that description, while true, is for public release. It's just a cover story. How do we know that? Well, the answer lies in a secret NSA document that provides guidance on how to describe the facility. In the document obtained by Background Briefing, is a paragraph headed 'Cover Story'.

Reading: Cover Story: The fact that the unclassified mission statement for Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is a cover story is secret.

Peter Cronau: Admitting that this description is a cover story, well, that's a secret too. Another reference warns:

Reading: Avoid any implication that this statement is only a sanitised portion of a larger classified effort.

Peter Cronau: But experts have been studying the real story.

Richard Tanter: I think it's an elegant piece of misinformation.

Peter Cronau: Professor Richard Tanter is from the global security research organisation, the Nautilus Institute. He's researched Pine Gap with colleagues Professor Des Ball and others, to produce the most detailed study ever on the capabilities of the base. He claims that even the sign on the front gate is misleading.

Richard Tanter: Pine Gap is labelled a joint facility, a joint Australian-American facility. The problem is if the facility is built by the United States, paid for by the United States, if it only works as part of a United States global technological system, then what it says on the gate doesn't matter very much. It's an American base, to which Australia has some access.

Peter Cronau: Today we'll peel back the official 'cover story' to show how the Pine Gap base has entered a startling new world of warfighting. We will show how it's actively involved in US military operations worldwide. That includes locating targets for lethal attack by US military forces, often in countries with which Australia is not at war. Those military attacks come by way of conventional military operations, by cruise missiles or special forces operations, or by the new killer of choice, unmanned armed drones.

Peter Cronau: Background Briefing has obtained a number of top-secret NSA documents that show Pine Gap base, NSA code-name RAINFALL, is providing support to military operations in battlefields and conflict zones of the US military.

These NSA documents are being published and broadcast here for the first time. They come from the massive archive of classified documents leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

One document, titled 'NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia' is marked 'Top Secret'. It's the first clear proof that the base has moved from strategic analysis to tactical military intelligence, showing the significant shift in Pine Gap's functions. It says:

Reading: Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap (RAINFALL) [is] a site which plays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations.

Peter Cronau: There's a good reason this is classified as 'Top Secret', it's evidence of the base's elevated military role.

So what does Pine Gap do?

Since the 1980s, it had become publicly known that the base was operated mainly by the CIA for worldwide surveillance, and by the NSA for detecting ballistic missile launches and collecting satellite communications.

But things have changed. Now it's the US military that has taken the base into its new role of battlefield surveillance, communications and targeting.

Richard Tanter again.

Richard Tanter: It still looks at the missiles of Russia, China, Pakistan, our colleagues in Japan, and Korea, and India. But it also does a great deal more. In particular it's shifted from a, if you like, national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence, actionable, time-sensitive intelligence for American operations in battlefields ranging frankly from the Pacific all the way through to Africa. That's a huge transformation,

Peter Cronau: Another of the NSA documents describes 'Missions 7600 and 8300'.

There are four huge US military satellites in stationary orbit 36,000 kilometres above the surface of the Earth, controlled and commanded by operators at Pine Gap, and another base in the UK. The satellites collect data from phone, radio, microwave, satellite uplinks, and other civilian and military transmissions.

Reading: The geostationary orbit of the Mission 7600 satellites allows them to provide continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass and Africa.

Peter Cronau: So from the middle of Australia, Pine Gap looks north and west to cover Africa, the Middle East, Russia, China, and East Asia.

On the other side of the globe, situated in the English countryside, the US and UK's Menwith Hill base covers the western hemisphere, including the Middle East and Africa, but in addition Europe and the Atlantic landmasses.

Reading: [Mission 7600] is primarily used as a COMINT Communication Intelligence collection system against known targets of high intelligence value. Currently, about 85% of collection is against these COMINT targets.

Peter Cronau: All types of communications, signals and electronic intelligence are sucked up by the United States' huge spy satellites and then fed into Pine Gap.

Revelations by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden have shown how so much of the world's communications data, including from phones and emails, is collected and stored by the NSA. They're scooped up by spy programs such as the curiously named XKEYSCORE, a program used at Pine Gap.

Richard Tanter: Those transmissions can be collected from the edge of the Pacific to the edge of Africa. Pine Gap then supplies that data, processes that data, analyses it, if necessary decrypts it and then passes it on to the Pentagon for often direct transmission to theatre battle operations.

Peter Cronau: Another secret NSA document, a 'Site Profile' of Pine Gap, codenamed RAINFALL, explains it not only collects military signals, it also analyses them as one of the main missions of the base.

Peter Cronau: These PROFORMA signals are the communications data of radar systems and weapon systems such as surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, and fighter aircraft. This vital tactical information is provided in near real-time to US forces in battlefields. Pine Gap's analysing of this data gives a significant warfighting advantage.

The revolution in digital communications has transformed spying and warfare. Crucially it is the detailed geolocation analysis that allows precise location of the source of signals which has become so useful.

Reading: One of RAINFALL's primary mission areas is the detection and geolocation of Communications Intelligence, Electronic Intelligence and Foreign Instrumentation signals.

Peter Cronau: David Rosenberg worked as an NSA intelligence analyst inside Pine Gap from 1990 to 2008, and he confirms the base's geolocation capability.

David Rosenberg: We're talking about the ability of satellites to geolocate particular electronic transmissions. Satellites of course have had that ability for many, many decades now, the ability to geolocate an electronic signal. So if we do need to know where an electronic signal is coming from, certainly ground sites in addition to the Pine Gap facility would have that capability. Not only in the US intelligence community but from other countries as well.

Richard Tanter: Those documents provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cell phones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa. It shows us that Pine Gap knows the geolocations, it derives the phone numbers, it often derives the content of any communications, it provides the ability for the American military to identify and place in real time the location of targets of interest.

Peter Cronau: Richard Tanter says Pine Gap analysts can zero in on a specific telephone of a target.

Richard Tanter: It analyses that material for the precise location of the telephone, the telephone number of the user and then the content and then anything else that can provide intelligence to the American military. It's then passed on from Pine Gap by optical cable, directly to the United States.

Peter Cronau: And that's when it becomes useful to the soldiers in the battlefield, says Tanter.

Richard Tanter: And in cases of, say, counter-terrorism operations, it's then passed on to the Joint Special Forces Operations Command and to the controllers of drone operations at Creech Airfield in Nevada.

Peter Cronau: Lethal drones are used by the US military for strikes as a part of military actions, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. But they are also used by the CIA for extrajudicial killings in countries where the US is not officially at war, like Yemen and Somalia. Pine Gap is crucial in keeping these lethal drones on target.

Background Briefing spoke to two former military personnel who both worked on the US drone program. The experiences they lived through changed their lives forever.

Cian Westmoreland: The thing is, with drones they're network dependent weapon systems, so they're kind of like the tip of the spear but the rest of the spear is actually a global communications surveillance system.

Peter Cronau: Cian Westmoreland left the US military in 2010 after four years as an air force signals relay technician for lethal drones in Afghanistan. He had an essential role tracking targets as a part of that global communications system.

Cian Westmoreland: All of this information that's getting sucked up is being used to basically develop targets and find out where the next strike is going to be. When you're actually developing a target, you're taking information from various sources. As you were saying, the geolocation, you're overlaying that with imagery to find out where exactly the person is geographically that you're looking at, and it's called cueing.

Peter Cronau: Westmoreland didn't really consider that he was involved in the killing of people until he finished his time in the air force. Something happened then that made him reconsider his role in that global communications system.

Cian Westmoreland: At the end of the tour, it was basically a report coming down from the Combined Operation Centre that said that we assisted in 200-plus enemy kills. They would not internally give me the civilian casualty numbers but looking at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reports, they said that there was 359 civilians that had died in that time period. That was within our area of responsibility, which was essentially all of Afghanistan.

Peter Cronau: It's this responsibility and complicity in civilian deaths that's haunted Westmoreland, and driven him to speak out.

And, while he was never stationed at Pine Gap, he thinks the true role of the base means Australia can't bury its head in the desert sand.

Cian Westmoreland: You're assisting in the greater mission of targeting, which is a…it's pretty much a global affair. You have different countries doing different things all working together. It's collaborative and it's really hard to say, 'The Australians are responsible for this,' or, 'The British are responsible for that.' Everybody is working together and if the Australians were involved in one piece that happened to be used in a strike, they're essentially complicit with whatever the end result is.

Peter Cronau: Westmoreland was deeply affected by his experience and believes the Australian government knows well the true nature of the alliance relationship, but is unwilling to tell the public.

Cian Westmoreland: We talk about military partnerships but in reality the Australian military is really doing the bidding of the US military in a sense. We talk about how we are partnered in Alice Springs but you have China as your greatest trading partner yet the US is, it seems more geared towards US interests. I think that the Australians are really reluctant to admit their complicity in whatever they're doing, partly because it's not entirely…well, it might not be perceived entirely by the Australian population that they're acting out of the Australian population's interest.

Lisa Ling: My name is Lisa Ling. Specifically my last two years of deployment I worked at Beale Air Force Base on what is called the Distributed Ground System. I worked on security and different things of that nature.

Peter Cronau: Can you tell me what this Distributed Ground System does?

Lisa Ling: Basically it's a very large networked system. It's a large telecommunication system that networks data pretty much around the globe.

Peter Cronau: How does that all fit together? How does it work?

Lisa Ling: So I'm not permitted to tell you exactly about any of the technology that puts it together but what I can say is that I wish I could. I wish that a lot of us knew what is being done in our name overseas and what is being used to consummate these wars.

Peter Cronau: The base out at Pine Gap has 800-odd staff there. The Australian government describes it as something little more than a relay station. Do you know the sort of analysis that goes on there?

Lisa Ling: You know, I can only tell what's been put on the internet, and historically Pine Gap has been doing that same kind of work for years. I can't tell you specifics because I like my freedom and I don't want to end up in a federal prison, even though it is for the common good of people to know what is being done in our name.

Peter Cronau: Despite understandably holding back on the technical detail, Lisa Ling knows the effects of the drones she helped keep in the air.

Lisa Ling: Drones hover. They hover above soccer games, they hover above marketplaces, they hover above places where people do their daily things like shopping, praying. They hover. And you don't know whether the next time you turn around you're going see your grandmother in pieces. Imagine if that were happening to us with very little governance. We would not tolerate it. So why is it that we are tolerating it on black and brown people around the globe? Why? Where has our humanity gone?

Peter Cronau: In the ten years to 2017 the UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented thousands of lethal US drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries, killing thousands of militants but also hundreds of civilians. It was such reports of civilian casualties caused by not so precision drone strikes that led Lisa Ling to resign her position on the US drone communications systems.

She wanted to see the human impact of the drone strikes she'd worked on as an US Airforce technical sergeant, and so in 2013 she travelled to Afghanistan.

Lisa Ling: Because of the distance with the drone technology, I wanted to see what it was really like on the ground. I wanted to meet these people face to face. I wanted to get back in touch with the humanity that is just so missing in the drone program. We're talking about human beings and we've relegated the conversation to technological terms, we've relegated human beings to be targets. And I think that killing by remote control without any situational awareness is wrong. And I don't think we can fight a war on terror with more terror.

Peter Cronau: Being a part of this sometimes extrajudicial drone killing program has driven her to speak out, at conferences, to veteran groups, to the European parliament, and in the media. She can't keep her silence.

Lisa Ling: Is silence complicity? I mean, I believe it is. If I'm not speaking out about something that I don't want done in my name, then I'm complicit, and I don't think that anyone who is any part of this particular system can say they're not. It's not like I went to work in the morning and I pressed an Enter key on a keyboard and all of a sudden a child died in Yemen. It doesn't work like that. It's much more complex and in some ways convoluted, but I don't think that the methodology that causes the death of that child in Yemen needs to be dissected in such a way. If there's one communications node in Australia, then Australia as a nation state is complicit in what happens.

Peter Cronau: Peter Jennings believes if we have the best technology we should use it.

Peter Jennings: This is not about handing out sweets to children. You know, I think we've sugar-coated way too much of what the nature of military operations are. There's no point going into battle saying, well, we aren't going to equip ourselves with the technology to do this as efficiently as we can.

Peter Cronau: David Rosenberg is a 23-year veteran of the NSA, and for 18 years was stationed at Pine Gap, where he was team leader of weapon signals analysis.

David Rosenberg: The tasking that we get at Pine Gap is really just saying 'look for this signal coming out of this particular location, if you find it, report it, and if you find anything else that might be of interest, report that as well'. So that's the kind of tasking that we would be looking for. It would be up to the recipients who get this kind of intelligence to make these kind of decisions as to is that relevant, is that what we are looking for, are these the people we are targeting, could they be civilians? One thing I can certainly tell you is that the governments of Australia and the United states would of course want to minimise all civilian casualties. Pine Gap certainly does help to provide limitation of civilian casualties by providing accurate intelligence.

Peter Cronau: In counterinsurgency in countries where there's perhaps not warfare, and I think of Philippines at the moment perhaps, and in countries where there's no declaration of war, is there any risk that that's overstepping the mark in assisting a military to pick targets in a country that neither Australia nor the US is officially at war with?

David Rosenberg: Well, making those decisions of course is at a much higher level than what would be decided on at the Pine Gap facility, so really we simply receive the intelligence tasking as we get it, knowing that that's already been evaluated already and has been properly vetted for those of us at Pine Gap to collect those signals. So the targets that we do go after are always fair game for collection by Pine Gap.

Peter Cronau: Do you see on a screen that something has gone wrong? When you are doing things, do you know that, for example, 'blimey, they hit the wrong building, we weren't targeting that'? Do you see it unfolding?

David Rosenberg: We don't see it unfolding, we hear about it of course on the news et cetera, and, like I said, every time it happens it's a real tragedy. When you lose people and when people die who really are non-combatants…but that does happen, it has been reported over and over that it does happen. Fortunately it doesn't happen all the time, hopefully that is a very limited occurrence.

Peter Cronau: And Rosenberg wants it to be absolutely clear just what the base is not capable of.

David Rosenberg: I can tell you that Pine Gap has absolutely no offensive capability whatsoever, the satellites are simply passive collectors. So there's no decisions made at the Pine Gap facility by any personnel there to let's say initiate a drone strike, to monitor any kind of drone communications, to initiate a strike by drones or any other type of aircraft let's say. So the facility is there simply to passively eavesdrop on electronic signals, to collect them, to analyse those signals and, like I said, it has no offensive capability whatsoever.

Peter Cronau: And the base is of great benefit to Australian military forces on overseas operations, according to David Rosenberg.

David Rosenberg: Well, one of the things the facility does of course is to monitor any kind of military hot spots. If the Australian military were involved in any operations and Pine Gap could help to that extent to evaluate and determine what was happening on the ground, let's say, we could minimise the risk to any Australian military personnel who might be involved in those operations.

Peter Cronau: Human rights experts think even if it's worth it, the public needs to be informed.

Emily Howie: I think Pine Gap personnel should be told exactly whether or not…with good proper legal advice from the government, whether or not what they are doing is potentially a war crime or not.

Peter Cronau: That's Emily Howie, an international humanitarian law expert. We'll hear more from her later in the program.

We asked the Minister for Defence Marise Payne to be interviewed about the base and the implications of the new information contained in the NSA documents. She declined the request.

In this story, the task of explaining the Australian support of US drone strikes, defending the use of Pine Gap to support US military operations, and discussing the utility of the US-Australia alliance, falls to Peter Jennings. He's from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an independent think-tank in Canberra, funded largely by the Department of Defence.

Peter Jennings: I have to be a little careful in what I say about Pine Gap. I've been in the national security community and I have some constraints on what I can say about the joint facilities.

If you accept that our country in the form of the US and for that matter Australia, if you accept that we're fighting necessary conflicts in the Middle East, then it's appropriate that our intelligence facilities support those conflicts. It reflects a reality that both Australia and the United States and a significant number of other countries besides, are engaged in military operations against a fairly entrenched enemy in the form of extremist terrorists that are operating in a number of countries in the Middle East. So I think it's perfectly reasonable that we should be using our intelligence resources to support our military operations in those countries.

Peter Cronau: And on that point, Jennings has backing here from one of Pine Gap's most prolific critics, Richard Tanter.

Richard Tanter: It does have a role, a legitimate role in assisting in counter-terrorism operations, particularly in Australia, as a case. Activities in Indonesia, in the Philippines, these are the areas we should be watching very carefully. Terrorism is a real matter. It may be exaggerated, it may be misinterpreted, but it is real. Pine Gap can help us there.

Peter Cronau: But Richard Tanter and Peter Jennings' agreement ends there. Jennings argues there is a legitimate reason for Australia to give its best intelligence support to lethal drone strikes.

Peter Jennings: In the case of drone attacks, you know, these things are really done on the basis of very precise intelligence about specific individuals that are being targeted. Again I think they've been very successful in killing a number of senior terrorist figures, but that does require very precise intelligence of a real-time nature so that you can locate a particular individual and be absolutely certain that they're in, you know, the third car in the convoy, that that type of intelligence. If you don't have that sort of data then an attack won't take place.

Peter Cronau: Peter Jennings says we have to rely on the Americans as part of the alliance, otherwise we would have to double our defence spending.

Peter Jennings: It's fundamentally important to our defence capabilities. I've, on a very broad back-of-the-envelope calculation, said that we'd probably have to double our defence spending from 2% to 4% of gross national product if we didn't have the alliance to back us up with intelligence and a range of military capabilities. So it remains I think something that's absolutely fundamental to Australia's defence and intelligence capabilities.

Peter Cronau: But peel back a layer or two behind these pragmatic decisions to go all the way with the USA, and the fundamental nature of the US-Australia alliance comes into play.

Former senior diplomat and ex-ambassador, including to the United States and Indonesia, John McCarthy again:

John McCarthy: You could say that there was a pretty clear reason to be in Afghanistan, because there was an attack on the territory of the United States. That's covered by the alliance, that's quite straight forward. Also, with Afghanistan, it was a multi-lateral effort with UN endorsement. That too is important. Iraq, that was a different thing. There are strong arguments to be made that we probably should not have been involved in that. The main, I think, arguable reason for being in that particular war was 'alliance dues'. Now, whether they were in fact necessary, given everything we had done with the United States, is another question.

Peter Cronau: John, you just mentioned the phrase 'alliance dues', can you explain what you mean by that?

John McCarthy: 'Alliance dues' has been used since the '50s. Certainly it was used in Vietnam. The argument essentially is that if you want the United States to assist Australia in circumstances which are crucial to Australian security, you are going to be in a better position to seek that assistance if you have worked with the United States on matters which are crucial to them. That is 'alliance dues'. Now, there is an argument made that Vietnam was 'alliance dues'. There's an argument made that certainly Iraq post-Afghanistan, when George Bush Junior went into Iraq. It is debated whether Australia has perhaps paid more 'alliance dues' than is actually necessary. Some would argue that it has.

Peter Cronau: This view is becoming more common amongst former politicians and senior public servants, like former prime ministers Paul Keating and the late Malcolm Fraser.

John McCarthy says changing circumstances require a re-think of the US-Australia alliance.

John McCarthy: Well, it would entail, I think first of all, a preparedness to be flexible, a preparedness to look at circumstances always in the light of what is strictly in the Australian national interest, rather than in terms of the alliance relationship. We have to think of that. We have to think that at some stage down the line, the American commitment to East Asia might be different to what it is today. There are changing moods in the United States. So we then need to think, should we try and develop closer security relationships with other countries in Asia? Should we seek to improve our overall structural relationship with China? What I'm trying to argue is that we're entering into a very, very fluid situation in Asia. I don't know what the outcomes are going to be. But we have to be very, very…to use the word of the day, we have to be very, very nimble in terms of trying to create new structures, create new relationships, to be able to look at new circumstances from a very independent security perspective, if we are to do the right thing by the Australian people over the next generation or so.

Malcolm Turnbull [archival]: We stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States. The ANZUS treaty means that if America is attacked we will come to their aid, if Australia is attacked, the Americans will come to our aid. We are joined at the hip. The American alliance is the bedrock of our national security.

Peter Cronau: The North Korea standoff and the South China Sea dispute place Pine Gap's battle-fighting role front-and-centre in any conflict in the region.

A secret Defence Review leaked to an Australian journalist in 2012 revealed a frightening prospect.

Reading: Defence thinking is that in the event of a conflict with the United States, China would attempt to destroy Pine Gap.

Peter Cronau: If Trump decides to bomb Pyongyang or that there's a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, do you think Pine Gap will be targeted?

David Rosenberg: Well, we have to hope that cooler heads will always prevail in these kind of situations and we won't be involved in that kind of a conflict, but the chance of an attack on Pine Gap would be very, very, very remote. The retaliation of course by the United States would be the biggest deterrent for any country wanting to initiate an attack on one of its intelligence collection facilities. Like I said, cooler heads should prevail in these kind of situations, and we really have to hope that that won't be the outcome.

Peter Cronau: That was David Rosenberg again.

The risk is in any really serious conflict occurring in our region, Pine Gap may well be a target, but it's a risk no one in government has thought to tell the public about.

The expectations for Australia's 'alliance dues' are under the spotlight with US President Trump.

Donald Trump [archival]: They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement and, as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thankyou.

Peter Cronau: President Trump's talking there about North Korea, where his Administration is taking a more confrontational stance.

The Trump White House is also, according to the New York Times, seeking to 'dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones'. Already Trump has granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of Yemen to be an 'area of active hostilities' to allow looser battlefield rules to apply, and he wants the same for parts of Somalia.

Australia too has revised its battlefield rules, in particular those that relate to the targeting of enemy militants in Syria.

Australia is operating in murky legal, ethical and strategic territory because the drone killings have spread to countries where no state of war exists with Australia, such as Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Whilst we may have no troops on the ground, Australia is fighting in those wars through Pine Gap.

Deadly drone attacks are increasingly being used, and this year the rate of civilian deaths from drones has tripled under the Trump administration.

Emily Howie: The legal problem that's created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict, or war crimes as it's called colloquially, and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap.

Peter Cronau: Emily Howie is the director of advocacy and research at the Human Rights Law Centre.

Emily Howie: Australia, in so far as it is locating suspects that the US targets, is assisting the US. So it could be liable for any crimes committed by the US, in terms of aiding and assisting in that. And the question then is, is the killing that's done by the United States a war crime or not. We should remember that unlawful killing using drones is not only a violation of international law, it's a violation of Australian law as well. War crimes are a crime under the Australian criminal code, and there is therefore the ability of Australian authorities to investigate. But we need the willingness of those authorities to investigate in the first place.

Peter Jennings: People that work in our intelligence community work in a lawful regulated environment where there is appropriate oversight and very careful attention paid to making sure that our actions are lawful. That is how our people in the intelligence community approach their work. It's not the Wild West.

Peter Jennings: If anyone breaks the law in our intelligence community or any other place, then they are liable to be prosecuted for those offences.

Peter Cronau: But legal experts claim that enquiries into the practices of staff at Pine Gap quickly run into a brick wall, known as 'National Security'.

The new evidence in the top-secret NSA documents presented here by Background Briefing details how the functions of Pine Gap have locked Australia in to providing support for US wars and military actions virtually anywhere, anytime. These are the entanglements of the alliance. Richard Tanter:

Richard Tanter: The documents show us that Pine Gap literally hardwires us into the activities of the American military, and in some cases that means that we will cop the consequences, like it or not.

Peter Cronau: What are the implications if we're hardwired into the military action that we have no say over?

Richard Tanter: Well, when we're hardwired into it, for example if President Trump orders an attack on North Korea, which is a horrifying prospect given the nature of the Korean Peninsula, then Pine Gap will be contributing hugely in real time to those operations, as well as in preparation to it. So whether or not the Australian Government thinks that an attack on North Korea is either justified or a wise and sensible move, we will be part of that, like it or not. We'll be culpable in the terms of the consequences of what would definitely be a major war on the Korean Peninsula.

Peter Jennings: I don't see problems from integration into Pine Gap, that's really been a very successful part of the alliance relationship for the better part of 50 years. It's been I think a very essential partnership in the security of both countries and this is a system that's actually working well.

Peter Cronau: If Australia has full knowledge of US actions through Pine Gap and concurs with those actions taken, are we complicit in all they do?

Peter Jennings: Well, you might have to ask a moral philosopher about that. You can't participate in military actions of the type that we have in the Middle East and Afghanistan over a decade and a half now and say we're not complicit, clearly we are. We've chosen as a society, governments have chosen for us that we were going to be involved and I think we need to have the courage of our moral convictions to say, yeah, that means we have to take responsibility for the decisions that have been made.

Peter Cronau: Only much fuller knowledge of the activities of Pine Gap can ensure a proper public conversation and consideration of its potential risks and value.

What these NSA documents provide is evidence of the roles being undertaken by personnel at Pine Gap in actively supporting and enabling the actions of US military forces around the world.

Emily Howie of the Human Rights Law Centre:

Emily Howie: What we have here is a situation where we have credible and really serious allegations made against the personnel at Pine Gap, that they could be involved in assisting international crimes, war crimes. And we have absolutely zero transparency around what's happened. We have no evidence that the government is doing any oversight. We haven't had a legal opinion from the Attorney General or anyone from the government that says that they think what is happening is in accordance with the laws of war, and international and Australian law. We have essentially an accountability vacuum around Pine Gap that leaves Australian law in its wake.

Peter Cronau: And Emily Howie believes that Australia has much at stake.

Emily Howie: We completely understand that there needs to be intelligence sharing that happens at Pine Gap, but what we would ask is that sharing is done in a way that is consistent with democracy and the rule of law.

Peter Cronau: Background Briefing's story, 'The Base', was prepared in collaboration with The Intercept, a US investigative news website. The NSA documents referred to in this story are available on the Background Briefing website.

You can subscribe to Background Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts, or hit explore and listen on the ABC Radio app. You can tune in to a repeat of this program on Monday at 1pm or on Tuesday at midnight on Radio National. I'm Peter Cronau. Thanks for listening.